Design Focus: Of A Feather

In the spotlight this week are designs incorporating illustrations of birds in them. Let’s see how these sites featured our feathered friends.

Designs of the Week

Want your site to be as good-looking and inspirational as these? Start by choosing a well-designed theme from ThemeForest.

Raise the Roof

I love the stylized clouds and the literal electricity lines that pass through them. There’s also a wonderful parallax effect idea at play here: as you scroll down the sun in the background “sets” and moves down with you. When you get to the bottom, there’s a moon on the right side that rises.

Experiência Lecom

Another set of beautiful illustrations here, with the birds being accompanied by other flora and fauna. When you go to another page the background shifts sideways, making for an interesting transition effect even if the layout is your usual vertically scrolling site.

Poco Nido

Stitched backgrounds, clothes line, horizontal transitions… these three sites seem to be inspired beyond avian themes. Even the fly-out menu carries a similar look as the main content area.

Social Media Weekly

Responsive Web Design – The Responsive Designer
“I’ve been think­ing that if the web­sites we are all build­ing now respond/adapt to their sur­round­ings and what­ever device or screen size is thrown at them, then shouldn’t we as design­ers be more like this also? Shouldn’t we be more com­fort­able in adapt­ing to every new project or chal­lenge that comes at us?”

Web Design – Blame the Implementation, Not the Technique
“There is a fundamental problem with this line of thinking: it places the blame on the technique instead of the way the technique was implemented. Generalizing in this way discredits the validity of an approach based on poor execution, and that’s a very harmful way of thinking.”

HTML5 – HTML5 mythbusting
“The ongoing discussion about the “readiness” of HTML5 is based on a lot of false assumptions. These lead to myths about HTML5 that get uttered once and then continuously repeated – a lot of times without checking their validity at all.”

Web Design – Portfolios on the Web
“This isn’t how I want my work to be shown. This isn’t how I’d want to be shown anyone’s work. Browser screenshots? Please. Videos? Not everyone will browse my projects the same way. It was then I came to a scary realisation.”